He Has a Point

At the Capital Gazette, Gerald Winegrad: The Chesapeake Bay deteriorates into a quagmire full of broken promises 

After 40 years and $10 billion spent to restore the Chesapeake Bay’s polluted waters to meet basic Clean Water Act requirements, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and bay states have failed to do so.

EPA data document that 71.9% of Chesapeake’s tidal waters remain impaired (polluted) — an improvement of just 1.6% since 1985 when 73.5% of bay waters were impaired.

Despite repeated agreements and mandatory reductions ordered by a court, the EPA has refused to impose meaningful penalties to force states to fulfill their commitments to reduce bay-choking nutrients and sediment. Instead, EPA leaders have punted, wrongfully alleging they are partners not enforcers of the Clean Water Act. Who then shall enforce the law?

Bay states, including Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, have gladly joined the EPA in postponing the 2025 deadline to take necessary actions to clean up the degraded Chesapeake.

This occurs despite the states being allowed 15 years from 2010 to achieve mandated pollution reductions. A court settlement forced the EPA to impose these reductions after voluntary agreements repeatedly failed to do so. The EPA refused to impose any sanctions on bay states to ensure the attainment of commitments despite two subsequent lawsuits.

Nearly all states failed to meet 60% of their nutrient reductions by 2017. Now, EPA and the states acknowledge the 2025 deadline will not be met to attain 100% of the reductions. Once again, the EPA failed to impose sanctions to prod compliance.

Instead, the EPA and bay states gladly agreed to a “recalibration” of bay restoration plans in 2022. Instead of the states adopting new initiatives to curb agricultural and developed land pollutants, the major reason for the failure, EPA and the states decided to take until the end of 2025 to adopt a new plan.

An EPA Inspector General’s report of July 18, 2023, castigated EPA’s failure to embrace its leadership role to steer states toward addressing the most significant sources of remaining pollution. The IG report noted that the EPA knew how off-track bay restoration was in 2018 and still failed to act.

A Beyond 2025 Steering Committee was formed last summer to look at the 2014 Bay Agreement goals to achieve the necessary pollution reductions. The draft report came out on July 1 and it’s a giant nothing burger.

There are no specific actions to meet mandated pollutant reductions, to curb farm and development nutrients or to strengthen terms of the clean-up plans. The only reference to agriculture is an inaccurate claim of significant nitrogen reductions.

The EPA Bay Program recently concluded that such nitrogen reductions from all sources have been grossly overstated by nearly 50%. This is partly linked to increased farm fertilizer use, more farm animals and their excrement, and the ineffectiveness of farm best management practices despite $2 billion in grants to farmers since 2010.

The report fails to note the failure to achieve the most important overall goal of the 2014 Bay Agreement: Having all practices and controls installed to restore the bay’s water quality by 2025.Record amounts of chicken manure from 600 million chickens grown on the Eastern Shore are disposed of on land, jolting creeks with Bay choking excess nutrients. (Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Newscom)

In classic greenwashing typical of EPA and others regarding the Bay Program, the draft delivers a self-congratulatory message of how the Bay Program and the 2014 Agreement “continue to deliver valuable progress, locally, throughout the watershed and for the Chesapeake Bay itself.”

In a May 2023 report, 50 top bay scientists on the Bay Program’s scientific advisory committee reported the best that can be said is at least the bay has not gotten worse over the last 40 years.

They also found that Bay Program claims that phosphorus reductions were nearly achieved is contradicted by river monitoring stations finding limited evidence of reductions in phosphorous concentrations. The scientists also disputed significant gains in nitrogen reductions particularly from agriculture and other nonpoint sources.

The Beyond 2025 draft plan ignores these scientific conclusions and dismisses the need for a new Bay Agreement to meet the many challenges facing bay restoration, nor does it provide any details for what specific measures must be taken to achieve restoration.

This is a recognition that the EPA and states lack the commitment to implement necessary measures to curb agricultural and developed land pollutants. The plan is replete with suggested structural changes in the Bay Program that have little to do with reducing pollutants.

The chief recommendation is that EPA and bay states affirm their commitment to meet the goals of the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Agreement and adopt amendments to achieve the goals. However, the plan opens the door to reducing or replacing commitments not met. This tactic has been repeatedly employed in the past when critical goals are not met.

I agree with Gerald that the 'Bay Diet' basically failed. But where I differ is that I think the original menu was grab bag of environmental wishes, with very little chance in the real world, where people actually have to work. I also think the recent Chevron decision from the Supreme Court is going make EPA's approach to regulating the Bay much more circumspect in the future.